Talking with an accent or
having an emotional scene or impassioned outburst are not necessary to the act
of role-playing. Role-playing is about the CHOICES you make as a player: Who do
you fight? When do you run? What are you willing to offer in negotiation? Who
are you willing to aid…or spare from the knife? Role-playing is about
considering the feelings of the imaginary character and (for the duration of a
gaming session) making them your own.
People make the mistake of
thinking play-acting is the same as role-playing and then get upset and
frustrated that their 18 charisma character isn’t a “smooth talker” (because
the player isn’t a smooth talker in real life) or that their 18 intelligence
character can’t hold his own in intelligent discourse (because the player can’t
in real life). They get upset that they can’t “role-play the way they want to”
and perhaps more upset that the people who DO play-act well are getting XP
bonuses because of it (!) and then they want rules and systems for governing
“role-playing” (like adding a “negotiation” type skill) and before you know it,
you have 3rd edition (*sigh*).
Play-acting is superficial. Role-playing is not
play-acting, even though it can
incorporate play-acting. Play-acting is saying, “Have at thee, villain!” before
attacking. If you have a (character driven or derived) reason for attacking
said villain, then sure you are role-playing…regardless of whether you use a
funny accent or not.
However, I’ve gamed with
plenty of d-bags whose only real motivation was the player driven one of
“kill-loot-level” and who paid only the barest of lip service to justify their
in-game choices of action. Hey, D-Bag: if you don’t have a reason to kill-loot,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. Get a World
of Warcraft account already.
Really. We all understand
that part of the fun of D&D is leveling up…hell, it’s a damn imperative
since the game, as written, only allows full exploration of its content by
increasing in power and status (i.e. level). But man-o-man, especially in
free-form or “sandbox” type campaigns I’ve seen some behavior that just struck
me as…well, as wrong. Not because players weren’t getting along (they were),
but because…well, because I wanted some
role-playing. Not a lot, just a little…just something.
Watching players (mentally) salivate over imaginary points…especially when the DM’s
trying to create a rich and diverse environment for players to engage and
interact with…is just discomforting (and a little sad). But I guess I’m an
elitist snob about a lot of things, not just role-playing.
[for the record, these folks were ones I played with, not ones in
adventures or campaigns I ran as a DM. I tend not to be too easy on characters
in my games, and these types of players seem to gravitate to a
more…um…”forgiving” breed of DM than myself]
So anyway, where was I? I
mean besides 22 pages and 10K+ words into this thing. Oh, yeah…3rd Edition.
Unlike AD&D 2E, I
still own my core rulebooks for the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I do this so
that I’ll never again be tempted to buy them again. Well, that’s the main
reason…they also have historic significance, some interesting design things,
and a lot of nice, inspirational illustrations.
Hmmm…but before we delve
into 3E, I’d like to anecdotally mention that I had the chance to talk with Tim Morgan down at Gary’s Games today. Tim runs the store and has decades of
experience playing and running role-playing games. He’s also a designer himself
and only last year published his magnum
opus, Ellis: Kingdom in Turmoil…a 600 or so page RPG that I will
probably never play because, you know, “too big.”
I put to Tim the same
questions about role-playing, I’d previously asked of Kris, Kayce, etc. It took
him a couple tries to grok what I was asking, as he’s used to parents (and
others) coming into the store and asking “what’s a role-playing game” and he
has some standard spiels he likes to rattle off. However, I finally got him to
answer the question (describe the ACT of role-playing, etc.), and the gist of
his answer was:
When you take actions that you normally wouldn’t and
that are actually detrimental to your character.
Which is a little
different from my own take, though it would still follow the self-sacrifice guidelines of Allston’s Rules Cyclopedia. However, it hashing it
over with him, it turns out we were NOT quite on the same page, though only
because of his preferred method of role-playing: he wants his characters to get
into predicaments and suffer. Now,
that’s simply Tim’s preference if he likes playing characters that are always
destined for doom…but he also seems to enjoy what the Forge-ites would call
Pawn-Director stance (or Pawn-Author stance) in terms of his approach to RPG
“play,” and for me this kind of breaks the idea of role-playing for me. Not
because you can’t play that way in those imaginary fantasy games we lump under
the umbrella term “role-playing games,” but because playing with a detached
viewpoint is removing oneself from the vicarious fantasy play one
experiences in the ACT of role-playing.
So that was interesting (that we disagreed)…I’m not sure I was able to
turn him on the point, either, which leads me to wonder a bit how this series
of posts are going to be received when I finally start putting them on the
blog.
; )
The other interesting
thing was when I asked him the part about how he learned to role-play, what his first experience was with the act of
role-playing (not just with playing an RPG). Tim was VERY specific with his
answer: he remembered being in a gaming group that was playing a
post-apocalyptic RPG in high school and he wanted
to engage in the act of role-playing, but didn’t feel it would be
appropriate/acceptable with that particular group and so moved on to a
different gaming group where it would be…however, nothing taught him, he simply wanted to “do something” that he couldn’t
even articulate at the time.
He also said that he had
played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons
before, had started on D&D as a kid in fact, and had never before engaged
in (or been interested in) “role-playing” or anything more than wargaming-type
dungeon crawls. As it turns out, his
introduction to D&D was through 1st
edition AD&D, with maybe the briefest of stints with Holmes Basic (a couple-few weeks before
getting his first PHB)…so the form of D&D he grew up on was in that strange
period prior to Moldvay when “role-playing” aspect of the game wasn’t
emphasized.
So, so different from my
own gaming origins.
Okay, I’m going to call it
a night and try to finish this up tomorrow with D&D3. I’ve been writing
this “essay” for almost a week now, and even though I intend to break it into
installments, it’s going to be a loooong slog for readers. I can only hope it’s
at least a little helpful to folks.
[to be continued]